There are 256 levels in Pac-man, and every single one of them is harder than the last. That's a problem, because level one isn't exactly a walk in the park. At least, not for us because Pac-man comes from a time when games were designed to be as hard as humanly possible, because you weren't supposed to "complete" the game, it was supposed to crush you.

Pac-man is hardly a new game, in fact it's 33 years old. But this is the first time it's been free to play on Android since it launched on Google's phone OS in 2008 - it was the first video game on Android, by way of trivia. So, how does this new, free, game stand up?

Pac-man + tournaments

As a Pac-man game goes, it's the real deal. There's all the original sounds, and ole' Pac looks as yellow and pie-charty as ever. The control is easy enough too. You can simply swipe on the screen, and pacman will change to that direction. The exact control is changeable too, and in landscape mode you can only have swipe but for portrait there's also the option to have an on-screen joystick.

There's also a tournament mode here. To access it, you need to register, and then you'll get a certain number of free plays to compete each day. You can buy more if you want, and there are other ways to get tokens too - signing up will give you some, for example. Playing a tournament game will cost one token per go, which seems fairly reasonable.

The game is ad-supported, so you'll see the usual commercial stuff. Namco-Bandi throws in the odd interstitial page ad for one of its other games, but overall there's nothing terrible here and the ads don't come between you and the game. If they bother you, $0.99 (65p) gets rid of them for a month and $4.99 rids them forever.

As a free game though, there's plenty here to keep you amused. And the very nature of it means you can fit in a few levels while you're waiting for the doctor, or even while he's talking, if you fancy it.